Clay Cook is the co-founder Minti with his wife Rachel and Matthew Macfarlane in late 2005. Prior to Minti, he founded ineedhits in 1996. Visit his Minti profile here.

What is Minti, how did the service get started, and what is the meaning behind the name?

Rachel saw the need for a ranked parenting advice site, where parents can visit anytime to share and gain valuable parenting advice, using content generation and support tools that are more efficient than just discussion forums. The content is created by members in the form of articles, or questions and answers, and the articles are tagged, rated and commented on by the community to encourage the integrity and relevancy of the information created. Topics range from pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, babies, early childhood, schooling, tweens, teenage years and beyond.

The business was initially focussed on the parenting vertical but had a vision to provide the back-end tools for any kind of ranked advice social community in the future. We raised AUD$1.6m (approx. $1.22m USD ) from Angel investors in Australia to build the planned vibEngine technology and launched the Minti site in Beta on the 8th March 2006.

Minti is the first vertical we have launched using the vibEngine technology, and we have a few others in the pipeline which will launch in the coming months. We are also discussing licensing with partners who wish to launch their own ranked-advice vertical communities.

The name “Minti” does not have any specific meaning. We wanted a new and different brand that was not specifically tied to any other sites or meaning. After considerable searching and looking at over 40 potential names we chose Minti because it had a fresh clean feel and positive feedback was received from surveyed users.

You have been referred to as a "Myspace for parents". Is this a good way to describe your goals for the website?

Minti is a bit of a mix of Wikipedia, MySpace and TripAdvisor, with tools such as blog claiming and RSS feeds to improve the package even more.

The goals of the site are several:

To help parents with the enormous responsibility that parenting brings
To make the world a smaller place for all parents worldwide
To empower those with knowledge who can teach to those who need more knowledge
To ease and speed up the search for “relevant information” by allowing the community to decide what is best rather than some disembodied formula in presenting search results
To test and prove the vibEngine technology in live application

MySpace gives complete flexibility to users and assumes a certain level of technical capability to “build” your own page. Minti provides the tools to help parents grasp this new technology and leverage it for the benefit of all.

What is your business model and exit strategy for this service?

At present Minti is focussed on growing the membership base and only presents very subtle advertising on limited pages throughout the site. This is a differentiator from many parenting sites which bombard users with ads. At present we are happy to watch the community grow and have no specific exit strategy.

Meanwhile Vibe Capital is in the final stages of polishing its licensed API “vibEngine” for use by new vertical communities. This back-end engine will provide the basis for our soon to be launched new vertical offerings and is already being used by licensing partners for their own vertical markets. The vibEngine is also interesting for corporate application and our business model includes a mix of license fees as well as equity stakes in businesses in exchange for the provision of the back-end solution.